At a workshop event, Transport for London engaged businesses in thinking creatively about data, digital strategy and customer experience. Brittany Golob attends the bootcamp.

Challenge:

For years, companies have been trying to make sense of ‘Big Data.’ They’ve touted it and heralded its arrival, yet most have been unable to apply that data to make actual change within their businesses. Through modern digital applications and analyses, that is beginning to change, allowing change programmes internally and customer experience efforts to improve.

To work through some of the issues present in developing customer experience, experience agency WAE – in association with Transport for London (TfL) – held a one-day CX bootcamp for customer experience managers at organisations from Plan UK to Barclays and from British Gas to Coutts. The objectives were to encourage new methods of thinking about customer experience with particular regard to the influx of data into the business and how a digital strategy can shape customer communications and experience.

Chris Averill, CEO of WAE says this can lead to a competitive advantage for businesses, “Customer experience is really understanding that whole end- to-end experience a customer or user has in your business and being empathetic and understanding their needs and wants so you can deliver better service, better products. But more important than that is actually being able to predict future behaviour. If you understand your customer and you know where they are now, you start to predict where they’re going to be. You make your business needs proactive not reactive.”

Strategy:

To encourage this kind of shift, the bootcamp revolved around a challenge posed by TfL to make the transport system better for different types of customers. This resulted in a series of workshops and discussions that allowed attendees to think in detail about the mindset their customer has. From there, the travel journeys were mapped out and problems and opportunities began to arise. Following that, attendees devised methods of improving the customer experience and, for some of the delegates, feeding crowdsourced data on individuals back into the TfL system to make transport more efficient and more enjoyable.

Chris MacLeod, TfL’s marketing director, says, “Our open data ensures that our customers get accurate travel data through our website, third party apps and on platforms or at bus stops. The event with WAE bought together a range of experts to think about how we can improve products and services for customers using examples based on TfL’s open data, including moving towards more predictive information. Our unified API powers almost 500 individual apps and is used by more than 8,000 developers, researchers and analysts.”

TfL’s open API allows developers to make use of the organisation’s vast amounts of data and improve the service provided to those using the transport system. It has signed up 2,000 new users in the last six months.

For some businesses, the motivation may be obvious – happy customers equals more sales. For others, improving the customer experience may be about driving further engagement with the brand. Joe Morrison, head of business improvement & innovation at international children’s charity Plan UK, says his organisation uses digital to improve its audience targeting and to create further touchpoints with which customers can engage. “We’re using our data in better ways, but we’re also creating really good experiences for people so that they have a sense of impact of what their support is doing and they’ll want to do more things for us,” he says.

Morrison adds, “That’s where I think the use of digital is really interesting, around how can you use better content, better engagement. Enable people to share more if they have a positive experience with us and help them create a sense of empathy with the children we support and work with around the world.”

In other businesses, building brand loyalty or developing trust may be the objective behind a better customer experience. For those in professional or financial services – delegates from which made up most of the day’s attendees – customer expeience is closely linked to reputation and building trust in the business. Some have focused on service and digital products as a means of developing relationships with customers and ultimately boosting the corporate reputation.

Nationwide Building Society, for example, has been leading the pack in rebuilding reputation post- recession. It led all UK banks in the annual Reputation Institute RepTrak 150 ranking. Ed Coke, director at the institute, says those sectors are still in recovery mode but that standouts focusing on service and long-term strategy are leading the pack in terms of reputation. For most organisations, the goal behind improved customer experience and digital strategy is to enable businesses to humanise the problems with their services and figure out what the ideal experience should be through the application of their data.

Results:

At the bootcamp, each group of delegates devised a solution for three objectives of TfL’s and presented their findings – most went down the route of journey planning tools or new apps. But the benefit to TfL was in its understanding of its audience and how it can best serve all the customers on the transport network.

For businesses across the spectrum, digital can be applied in countless ways. But, Averill says, “The future is very much about connecting the business and the customer together seamlessly so employees have access to the same information and tools the customers have. The biggest revolution coming ever, ever is data. Not big data, micro data, individual personal knowledge.”

If organisations understand the ways in which their customers interact with their companies and how they want to be communicated with, they can form a greater relationship with that organisation. Not only will better data analysis and digital strategy help brand loyalty and trust improve, but sales and efficiency will evolve for the better as well.